I
had three voice mails on my phone: from Mandy, from Dorothy, and from Balakian, the hipster cop I’d started to think of as Kombucha. I’d already talked to Mandy, and I knew that if there was anything urgent, Dorothy would have texted me. So as I pulled the silver Chrysler into traffic on Rhode Island Avenue, I called Kombucha back.
“There you are. Heller, we need to talk.”
“I’m kind of busy. What’s this about?”
A pause. “We may have a suspect.”
“Who is it?”
“We need to talk,” he repeated.
“Give me an hour.”
“Sooner if you can, please.”
“Okay. Homicide branch in Southwest?”
“Uh, no. Let’s not meet at headquarters.”
“Okay.” Strange, I thought. “Who’s the suspect?”
“We can talk about that when we get together,” he said. “The sooner the better.”
Kombucha was maddeningly cryptic. It occurred to me, fleetingly,
that the suspect he had in mind was me. But he wouldn’t handle it this way, with a polite request to come in. He’d have shown up at my hotel with a squad of officers.
Then what questions could he possibly have? And why did he not want to meet at police headquarters?
—
Back at the hotel suite, I arrived to find Dorothy beavering away on her laptop. She was wearing jeans and a blouse in a deep shade of oxblood. Her fingernails were the same color. Her bracelets rattled as her fingers flew across the keyboard.
“Where’s Mandy?” I said.
“I think she’s at her apartment,” she said, not looking up. “She called me looking for you.”
“Shit.” I’d asked her to meet me at the hotel, where I could feel confident she was safe.
“Hey, what happened to you?” she said, staring at me. “My God.”
“I had a disagreement with one of the Centurions. Name of Curtis Schmidt.”
“Can I get you something?”
“I’ll grab some Advil. I’m okay.”
“You wanted me to find Thomas Vogel’s home address.”
“You got it?”
“It’s a hell of a thing. No, I can’t find it.”
“That’s impossible. He’s got to live somewhere.”
“There’s one Thomas Vogel in Virginia, and he’s not the one. Three in Maryland. None of them is an ex-MPD cop.”
“He has to own a house or an apartment. A mortgage, a lease, utilities—you’ve checked all the usual places?”
“Nick, give me a little credit.”
“Sorry.”
“I assume his house is in the name of some corporation. The guy’s a ghost.”
“He’s got to have a PO box somewhere.”
“Probably, but I can’t find it.”
“I have his phone number. On his business card.”
“Then you have more than me.”
I handed her the metal card. She looked at it, then typed some more. After a few seconds, she said, “Nothing.”
I looked for a phone number on my phone, then touched the number and the phone started dialing.
“Garvin.”
“Art, Nick Heller again. I’m looking for Thomas Vogel’s address.”
“The man himself?”
“We’re not turning up anything on the Internet.”
“Doesn’t surprise me. He keeps a very low profile.”
“Why?”
“The story he puts out is that the narcos he busted have friends who want to track him down and give him his own personal retirement package. So he keeps himself unfindable.”
“The department must have a good address for him somewhere.”
“Don’t count on it.”
“Can you look?”
“I’ll look. No promises.”
“Thanks.”
I ended the call, gave Dorothy a glance, shook my head. “That was my retired detective friend, Art Garvin. Doesn’t look good.”
“I’m not giving up.”
I hit the speed dial number on my phone for Mandy Seeger.
“Nick,” she answered. “You back at the hotel?”
“But you’re not here.”
“I had work to do. Where my work stuff is. My little home office.”
“I need you to transport your work stuff over here. Just until we’re done.”
“How do you define done?”
“Until we get an arrest in Kayla’s murder.” I thought,
if Kombucha was on the right track, that could be soon.
But I didn’t want to tell her yet. Not until I talked to Kombucha.
“I think you and I are working on different things. I want to know who was behind this Claflin hoax that snared me. Who hired the Centurions.”
“We may never know that.”
“Speak for yourself.”
I smiled with admiration. “Listen. I don’t think it’s safe for you to be out there investigating.”
“Safe? Who’s talking about safe? I didn’t go into this line of work to be safe.”
I heaved a long sigh. I thought:
soft target
. That was the phrase Vogel had used.
Guys like us, we take care of the sheep. We protect them and make sure they live quiet, safe lives
.
“I don’t think you understand what I’m saying,” I said. “Vogel’s people have already killed one person, and I honestly don’t think they’ll hesitate to kill another one if they decide they need to.”
She was silent for a few seconds. “And you think they’re following me?”
“It wouldn’t surprise me. I’ll bet they’ve set up tripwires out there. Certain people, if you go and visit them, talk to them, a wire gets tripped, a bell goes off somewhere, and the Centurions go into action.”
“It doesn’t sound like you to admit defeat.”
“I’m not. I’m not giving up.” I hesitated, and then said it: “I’m talking about you. I can take care of myself.”
“About me.”
“Right.”
“Is this—Heller, is this because of last night?”
“Of course not. It’s because you’ve been at the center of this thing since the beginning, which makes it dangerous for you if you stick your head up.” But was it, at least in part, about last night? I couldn’t ignore what I felt for her. That had to factor in. Would I be as protective of her if we hadn’t been intimate? I didn’t know. Maybe not.
But I knew what I knew, and I knew that Vogel’s people were dangerous and probably knew no limits, and that she was a soft target.
“Nick, I’ve been threatened before. But in the end, you don’t go after a journalist. You don’t kill a reporter. That just doesn’t happen.”
I happened to know for a fact that she was wrong. I knew of several journalists who were killed investigating big financial scandals. I hesitated, considered whether to say anything, and finally said, “It does happen, Mandy. It has happened, and it could happen. Don’t be foolish.”
“Jesus, Heller. Now you’re trying to scare me off?”
I was afraid she’d take it this way. Telling her about a genuine threat to her life was making her even more defiant.
“Let me pick you up. You can do whatever work you want to do here.”
“No.”
“All right, look. If you really insist on interviewing people, at least let me go with you.”
“Are you serious? Like I need a bodyguard?”
“Would my presence be that odious to you?”
She laughed.
I said, “Think of it as teaming up.”
“No, you know how I think of it? You want to chaperone me everywhere like I’m some Saudi woman, that’s what it is. It’s ridiculous. And I don’t want any part of that.”
“At the very least will you agree to work over here?”
“Yes. I’ll do that for you.”
“Great, let me pick you up.”
“No need. I’ll be over there soon. When I’m ready.”
“Okay,” I said, because I knew it wouldn’t do any good to push it further. No sense in being overbearing. “I’ll see you over here.”
Looking back on that day, it pains me to admit that I should have been more insistent, more overbearing, refused to take no for an answer.
Unfortunately, I didn’t.
A
rt Garvin called me back about an hour later.
“All the MPD has on Tom Vogel is a PO box.”
“Where?”
“Thurmont, Maryland.”
“Shit. No street address?”
“No. Nothing. Buddy of mine who used to hang out some with Vogel says he built his house himself. He’s some kind of gifted carpenter. It’s big—he called it a compound. It’s out in the woods, sort of a remote location.”
I thanked him and hung up. Half an hour later, I met Balakian at a hipster coffee shop on H Street in a part of Northeast called the Atlas District. Indie rock on the speakers, exposed brick, and not a lot of seating. He was already at a table drinking something light brown in a bottle. I ordered black coffee, which seemed to disappoint the bearded barista, who probably wanted to draw a fern pattern in the foam of a cappuccino.
“Kombucha?” I said with a smile as I sat down with my coffee. I could smell the skunky odor of rotten oranges wafting from his cup, and I wrinkled my nose.
“Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it,” he said. He was wearing a tweedy checked jacket with a vest and a dark blue shirt and a scarf around his neck. “So, dude, I owe you an apology.”
“Oh yeah?”
“We found a print.”
“Where?”
“On a piece of broken glass.”
“The wineglass?”
He nodded. “I went back to the MCL and asked them to look for prints, just in case. So they took the broken pieces of the wineglass from the bathroom and processed them in the superglue fuming chamber. Pulled up a couple of partials and ran ’em through NGI.” NGI, for Next Generation Identification Program, was the turbocharged successor to the old national criminal fingerprint database, IAFIS.
“And you got a match.”
“Right.”
“Who?”
“One of ours. A retired MPD sergeant named Richard Rasmussen.”
I shrugged. I’d never heard the name before. “Let me guess. He works for Centurion Associates.”
He scratched his little beard and sipped his drink. He said nothing. My phone vibrated in my pocket.
“You have a print on what could be the murder weapon,” I said. “Isn’t that enough? Did you bring him in for questioning yet?”
“I think it’s enough. I wrote out an affidavit. It’s on my lieutenant’s desk.”
“When does it become an arrest warrant?”
“The lieutenant has to approve it, then it goes to the US attorney’s office, then it goes before a judge.”
“So you might not get an arrest warrant after all.”
“Might not. Anyway, I’m still circling. Part of the reason why I wanted to talk to you.”
“What do you want to know? I mean, I don’t know the guy—never heard his name before.”
“You’re doing sort of a parallel investigation. What’s your take on how it went down?”
“My take? The girl was paid to make a false accusation against Justice Jeremiah Claflin. To claim they had a sexual relationship.”
“Paid by the Centurions?”
“That I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“Then paid by whom?”
“I’m working on that. She said it was an ‘organization of businessmen’ that paid her, that’s all she knew.”
“Go ahead.”
“I think the Centurions were brought in at first to protect her, to keep her from talking to anyone. Then to deal with her. First they tried to get her out of Washington, but I got in the way. They were afraid she’d start talking to me, I assume. She’d become a problem that had to be eliminated.”
“So why did she start talking in the first place?”
“I asked her questions. That was how it started. And she was scared. Maybe she felt bad about what she’d done. She had a conscience. Or maybe it wasn’t conscience at all. Maybe she was just scared she’d been caught in a falsehood. Whatever the reason, she started talking, and she had to be silenced.”
“And they staged it to look like a suicide.”
“Not too badly either. It convinced you for a while, right?” My phone kept vibrating. “Any luck on the call she placed from the room phone?”
“Yeah. She called a friend. I guess she just wanted to talk. She was scared.”
“And when she opened the door, at nine thirty-six?”
“Who knows. Rasmussen, probably. Maybe he said it was hotel security. Or the night manager. Or any of a number of things he could have said to get her to open the door. But open it she did. Then he left at ten twenty-five, when he was done.”
He took another sip of the vile brew. I pulled out the phone and glanced at it. Mandy.
“If you have Rasmussen’s print,” I said, “why are you still circling? Why not at least bring the guy in for questioning?”
“Frankly, because I’m getting heat.”
“From . . . ?”
“My bosses. My sergeant wants this case closed—he doesn’t want me to keep stirring it up. He doesn’t want another murder on the books. I’m facing a lot of ridicule for persisting.”
“So why are you?”
“It’s . . . something just doesn’t feel right about this case.”
“Is that why you wanted to meet outside police headquarters?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t know how . . . extensive the Centurions’ reach is.”
“Within homicide branch.”
He nodded, looked away for a beat. “There’s a reason why I caught this case. And just me, solo.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because I’m a novice. They didn’t expect me to push too hard. They knew I wouldn’t make waves. And they could hang me out to dry if it came to that.”
“And who’s ‘they’?”
He shook his head. “I know how it sounds. Paranoid or something. But . . . here’s the thing. Somewhere between the lab and evidence control at the property division, the evidence got ‘misplaced.’”
“The shards of glass?”
“Right.” He opened both his hands, turned them up. “No one can locate it.”
“How often does that happen—that crucial evidence gets ‘lost’?”
“Once in a while.”
“Not very often, I expect. Does that screw the case?”
“It’s a problem, but not devastating. The shards were photographed on the scene and the fingerprints were recovered and kept separately. If it goes to court, the defense will probably raise a stink, but it shouldn’t make a difference.”
“So why are you still pushing? Didn’t you get the memo? The case is closed. It was a suicide.”
He shrugged, shook his head. “It’s not right.”
“You know the name Thomas Vogel?”
“Of course. The Centurions.”
My phone vibrated again. I took it out. It was Mandy. “Do you mind?”
“Go ahead.”
I answered it. “Hey, Mandy.”
“Heller,” she said. “I’ve got something.”
I heard traffic noise in the background. “Where are you?”
“Southeast. Anacostia. I just talked to that old cop.”
“Mandy, I told you, I don’t want you out there—”
But she spoke right over me. “Remember the retired police detective in Southeast? This old guy who says he covered up a homicide years ago?” I remembered: the story she was investigating just before the Kayla story broke, about some big-name Washington player. “Well, you were right. And now I understand why I had to be discredited. With that phony Claflin story.”
“The homicide—who was it?”
She told me.
“Holy shit,” I said.
“Hey,” she said, her voice suddenly loud and sharp. “Excuse me, what do you think you’re—?”
“Mandy, you okay?”
“Hey!” she shouted. The phone made funny jumbled, crunchy sounds, as if it was hitting the ground.
“Mandy? Hello?”
But there was no reply.